The Democrats and old-guard news media (forgive the redundancy) are pathologically obsessed with the hypothesis that Team Trump and Russia rigged last November’s presidential election. If Donald J. Trump so much as played Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav on his stereo, these leftists deduce, he was in cahoots with the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the same folks who spy a KGB agent behind every filing cabinet in Trump’s White House are aggressively apathetic about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s policies, decisions, and actions that gave aid and comfort to Russia.

Hillary’s much-mocked “Russian reset” established the tone for the Clintons’ coziness with the Kremlin. On March 6, 2009, during a trip to Geneva, she presented Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a small, red button. Hillary thought it was emblazoned with the Russian word for “reset.” Her team mistranslated and the button actually read “overload.” Nonetheless, Clinton and Lavrov jointly pressed the symbolic button. And a new era in U.S.–Russian relations erupted.

While visiting Moscow on March 24, 2010, Hillary explained the Reset’s purpose: “Our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”

Hillary said this in an interview with veteran broadcaster Vladimir Pozner of Russia’s First Channel TV network. Pozner is a Soviet-era relic who still communicates in barely accented English. During the Cold War, he popped up on American TV and radio programs and presented the views of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pozner’s pleasantries made him and his totalitarian bosses seem blandly benign.

The shadiest deal that the Clintons hatched with Russia is called Uranium One. This outrage should mushroom into Hillary and Bill’s radioactive Whitewater scandal.

Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul and major Clinton Foundation donor, led a group of investors in an enterprise called Uranium One. On June 8, 2010, Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, announced plans to purchase a 51.4 percent stake in the Canadian company, whose international assets included some 20 percent of America’s uranium capacity.

Because this active ingredient in atomic reactors and nuclear weapons is a strategic commodity, this $1.3 billion deal required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Secretary of State Clinton was one of nine federal department and agency heads on that secretive panel.

The new Palestinian curriculum for grades 1 to 4 “is significantly more radical than previous curricula,” concludes a new study by Hebrew University’s Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). It “teaches students to be martyrs, demonizes and denies the existence of Israel, and focuses on a ‘return’ to an exclusively Palestinian homeland.”

In response to pressure from President Trump, Israel reportedly is preparing a series of concessions to Palestinians in a bid to re-launch peace talks. Trump may want to consider pressuring the Palestinians for parallel gestures, including correcting educational policies that are antithetical to peace.

Indeed, the IMPACT-se study warns that the “educational system has created a Palestinian nationalism that absolutely rejects the Other and is therefore incompatible with Israel’s existence.” Even more alarming, the report notes that the “Struggle against Israel and its disappearance is the main theme,” and “The 1974 PLO’s Phased Plan for the conquest of the Land of Israel/Palestine is taught. The curriculum reflects a strategy of violence and pressure in place of peaceful negotiations.”

The “Palestinian school curricula are inspected by the international donors who finance the Palestinian Authority and, by extension, its public education system,” the Times of Israel reported.

That includes huge investment from Britain, the Daily Mail reported, money that goes “into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.”

Incredibly, European countries pressure Israel to freeze settlement growth and take other steps towards peace, while funding pro-war messages targeted at future generations of Palestinians.

Islam is not used as a radical political tool in grades 1–4, but the educational message “includes biases towards non-Muslims,” the IMPACT-se study says. And, in grades 11-12, “Religion is clearly abused…to foment hate amid calls for eternal war in the Levant.”

The Palestinian curriculum of violence and hate highlighted by the IMPACT-se study is just one of the many ways in which Palestinian leaders have forced their violent agendas onto children.

It is also the first in what promises to be a long series of crushing major defeats for Democrats in the current Congress who are desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base.

The “nuking” of the filibuster rule yesterday bodes well for President Trump’s agenda. Trump is in a good position to remake the Supreme Court because so many of its members are elderly and are likely to vacate their seats over Trump’s four- or eight-year presidency. Three of the current eight justices are of retirement age. Left-wing Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are 84 and 78, respectively. Swing vote and occasional conservative Anthony Kennedy, who is 80, was appointed by President Reagan.

The senior Kentucky senator led the way as Senate Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option yesterday, voting 52 to 48 along party lines to abolish the filibuster for nominations to the Supreme Court. Rule changes supposedly require a supermajority vote – 67 senators voting aye – in the Senate but four years ago under then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the supermajority requirement was ignored and filibusters were disallowed for all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. Lowering the 67-vote requirement to that of a simple majority is the so-called nuclear option, also known as the constitutional option.

Although there was never a formal requirement that a Supreme Court nominee had to garner 60 votes to be confirmed, Democrats’ insistence that one had to be observed forced McConnell’s hand. The matter is now settled. Going forward, high court nominees, including Gorsuch, will need only a simple majority of senators to be confirmed.

It needs to be pointed out that the filibuster is entirely a creation of the Senate. The Constitution is silent on the matter. For those not versed in parliamentary arcana, under Senate rules any member is entitled to filibuster, that is, talk a bill to death or prolong debate indefinitely to prevent a matter from being voted on. A filibuster may be ended only if enough senators vote to invoke “cloture,” that is, vote to cut off debate.

McConnell denounced Democrats’ move to filibuster Gorsuch, saying it was part of a “much larger story” wherein the Left has been trying to politicize the judiciary and the confirmation process for years.

“It’s a fight they have waged for decades with a singular aim, securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution,” he said on the floor of the Senate. “It underlies why this threatened filibuster cannot be allowed to succeed.”

“During his interrogation, Sina was told that if he signed a confession and repented, he would be pardoned and let go,” said the source in an interview with CHRI on March 21, 2017. “Unfortunately, he made a childish decision and accepted the charges. Then they sentenced him to death.” “Later he admitted that he signed the confession hoping to get freed,” said the source. “Apparently the authorities also got him to confess in front of a camera as well.” — Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).

When the Islamists gain power, they immediately create their own “judiciary system” in order to “legitimize” their implementation of sharia law. In fact, the judiciary system is used less as a tool for bringing people to justice, and more as a tool to suppress freedom of speech and of the press.

To radical Islamist groups, Islam is not a religion which all are free to pursue; it is a weapon. It is the most powerful tool that can be wielded with manipulative skill to control entire populations. Beneath their fierce rule, every aspect of daily life is dictated. What is worn, what is eaten, what you say and what you write are all scrutinized; violations of these stringent laws are met with extreme punishments. Can you imagine making a joke and facing death as a result? Can you imagine the constant fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, when you have seen people beaten, stoned, or killed in the street for nothing more than a mild transgression?

Freedom of speech and press are the Islamists’ top enemies. They are targeted on a regular basis, making it difficult or impossible for the truth to be revealed to the world. While others may take their privacy for granted, the people living under this kind of tyranny must think about everything they say and do. Sometimes even the bravest of souls turn away in the face of such intimidation. Can it really be as restrictive as described? Yes, and far worse than you can imagine.

Sina Dehghan, 21, for example, was arrested by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) when he was 19 for “insulting Islam”. Charges were brought against him for insulting the Prophet Muhammad on the messaging app LINE.

According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI):

“During his interrogation, Sina was told that if he signed a confession and repented, he would be pardoned and let go,” said the source in an interview with CHRI on March 21, 2017. “Unfortunately, he made a childish decision and accepted the charges. Then they sentenced him to death.” “Later he admitted that he signed the confession hoping to get freed,” said the source. “Apparently the authorities also got him to confess in front of a camera as well.”

Such a sentence may seem like madness, but in fact there is a cold and calculated pattern to these actions. When extremist Muslims gain power, they immediately create their own “judiciary system” in order to “legitimize” their implementation of sharia law. This judiciary system is, in fact, used less as a tool for bringing people to justice, and more as a tool to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Once this silence is ensured, they are able to oppress the entire society, restrain any budding opposition, imprison and torture innocent people and sentence thousands to death.

Ambassadors to Israel representing 28 European Union States (EU) behaved most undiplomatically in ambushing the recently appointed Director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador to Australia – Yuval Rotem – at a meet and greet function Rotem had organised at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv last week.

Instead of the pleasant banter over drinks and canapes usually associated with such events on the diplomatic cocktail circuit the function erupted into an explosive EU protest against Israel’s plans to evict Arab squatters from 42 structures that had been illegally erected between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem at the strategically narrowest point in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) known as E1.

Lars Faarburg-Andersen – the EU Ambassador to Israel – took the opportunity to read out to Rotem the following one-page document which had been approved by the EU political-security committee – in which all 28 member states are represented.This gauche and uncivilised behaviour was certainly uncalled for and not conduct that one would ever expect to come from refined and cultured Europeans.

Reading this carefully-crafted statement at the function was a cavalier action aggravating the already strained relationship between the EU and Israel following the EU’s introduction on 11 November 2015 of labelling requirements for goods produced in Judea and Samaria entering Europe.

The statement revealingly exposes the hypocrisy of the EU for the following reasons:

1. It was presented as a “demarche” – a diplomatic or official initiative – a protest normally delivered through diplomatic channels – not at a cocktail function.

WASHINGTON — Declaring “no child of God should ever suffer such horror” as the “Black Tuesday” neurotoxin attack on a Syrian neighborhood, President Trump ordered a flurry of cruise missiles fired at the airbase from which the Assad regime planes that struck Khan Shaykhun originated.

Fifty-nine Tomahawks from two U.S. warships in the Mediterranean, the USS Ross and USS Porter, targeted Shayrat Airfield in Homs province at 4:40 a.m. local time. Defense officials reportedly used radar tracking to pinpoint the base as the originating location of the planes bearing an agent that produced symptoms consistent with sarin.

“As always, the U.S. took extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties and to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict,” Davis said. “Every precaution was taken to execute this strike with minimal risk to personnel at the airfield.”

“The strike was a proportional response to Assad’s heinous act. Shayrat Airfield was used to store chemical weapons and Syrian air forces. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that aircraft from Shayrat conducted the chemical weapons attack on April 4. The strike was intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again.”

Defense officials informed Russia ahead of time about the planned airstrike time and location, citing their previous deconfliction agreement to improve flight safety after near-misses as the Russians flew missions with Assad forces against Assad’s opposition and the U.S. flew missions against ISIS. “U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield,” Davis said.

The Pentagon is assessing the results of the strike, but “initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat Airfield, reducing the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons,” Davis said.

“The use of chemical weapons against innocent people will not be tolerated,” he added.

Pentagon sources told CNN that they believe Russians were at the airfield when the sarin attacks were launched earlier in the week. Arab reports tonight indicated Hezbollah were among the casualties at the base. CONTINUE AT SITE

The pernicious lie that President Trump’s claim he was wiretapped by President Obama is “baseless” is being regurgitated in the mainstream media virtually nonstop in the 24/7 news cycle.

These people are so desperate to hang Trump that they embraced the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier promoted by political hack Ben Smith’s cat-video website Buzzfeed.

At the same time as we are assured by Never Trumpers that Trump is making things up, the so-called evidence of Team Trump’s allegedly nefarious connections and collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American electoral process is treated as Holy Writ. The Left and the mainstream media – but I repeat myself – gravitate to the evidence that hurts Trump, ignoring the rest.

It’s that simple. And there is an impressive evidentiary double-standard at work in the weighing of evidence, much of which apparently has been politicized.

But as far as I can tell, nobody has clearly pointed out the seeming arbitrariness in the media taking the word of one group of spies over the other.

We know that the evidence supporting both the anti-Trump and pro-Trump claims reportedly comes from unnamed sources within the same U.S intelligence community (IC). If anyone with direct personal knowledge of evidence backing either claim has gone on the record, I’ve missed it (and I spend all day long on the Internet).

Why should we believe one set of anonymous IC sources over another? We don’t know who these people are – on either side — and what axes they may have to grind. And we shouldn’t blindly trust these intel people, either. There may be plenty who are honest and honorable, but there are plenty who aren’t. (See McMullin, Evan, and Rice, Susan.) At this point at least, we’re in no position to assess the evidence. All we have so far is one set of faceless spooks anonymously providing evidence that contradicts what the other spook cohort reportedly said.

We’ve just come out of the roughest, nastiest presidential transition in my lifetime, made so by Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat like Obama. While Obama smiled for the television cameras and pretended to be cooperating with the Trump people, behind the scenes he worked zealously to lay minefields to safeguard his destructive, anti-American legacy.

There is no parallel in American history for the Obama administration’s not-so-metaphorical war against the incoming Trump administration. Obama has even taken the extremely unusual step of staying behind in the nation’s capital to vex and harass his successor. He has rented an Embassy Row mansion not far from the White House, built a wall around it to keep prying eyes away, and arranged for his senior White House advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to live there. He is also using his well-funded nonprofit, Organizing for Action, to do his dirty work.

Obama’s strategy is working. The constant drumbeat about Russian meddling has helped to keep Trump’s approval numbers low enough that he can’t get his agenda through Congress.

BRUSSELS—Tensions between senior U.S. and European Union officials escalated over the prospect of limiting visa-free travel for EU citizens due to U.S. security concerns.

European Migration and Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos on Thursday rebuffed comments made by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly about possibly reconsidering visa-free travel for EU citizens. The transatlantic spat comes as the Trump administration is seeking to ramp up security checks at U.S. borders, while the EU has just expanded its visa-free regime to Ukraine and its 45 million people.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, Mr. Kelly suggested that the so-called Visa Waiver program allowing citizens from nearly all EU countries to travel to the U.S. without a visa could be reconsidered because of the potential risk that terrorists with EU passports could enter the U.S. unchecked.

He said that some 10,000 European citizens are fighting for Islamic State and could hop on a plane and travel visa-free to the U.S., because of borderless travel in Europe and the fact that “in many cases the countries where they’re citizens don’t know that they’ve been out of the country fighting in Syria.”

“That doesn’t keep me up at night too much but it does keep me up, so we’re looking at Visa Waiver,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Avramopoulos, who recently met Mr. Kelly to discuss moving in the opposite direction and extending visa-free travel to all EU countries, reacted with surprise to this statement.

“We should be careful when using numbers. We estimate that around 5,000 EU citizens traveled to Syria and Iraq—not 10,000. But not all will come back: We estimate that about half of them are still there, many have died in fighting, some of those have returned to Europe,” Mr. Avramopoulos said. “We know who is back, and they are under very close scrutiny by national security services, flagged in security databases and monitored.”

He added that as of April 7, all travelers, be they EU citizens or not, will have their passports checked against security databases upon entering and leaving the bloc. Until now, EU citizens were exempt from such checks at the borders.CONTINUE AT SITE

Syria’s staunchest foes in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and Israel—cheered the U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base early Friday, saying they sent a clear message that the international community wouldn’t tolerate chemical weapons.

However, Iran, which is a key military and financial backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, condemned the attack as a move that would deepen the chaos in Syria and strengthen armed opposition groups.

“Tehran considers using this excuse to take unilateral measures dangerous, destructive and a violation of international laws,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The U.S. military launched dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles overnight against the Shayrat air base near the city of Homs in Syria, following this week’s suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town. The U.S. strikes were intended to cripple the base’s airfield and other infrastructure, and to indicate that the chemical attack was unacceptable to the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, which an important ally of the Syrian anti-government opposition, declared its full support for Washington’s operation.

“The Syrian regime brought this military operation upon itself,” said a statement attributed to a foreign ministry official and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. “The brave decision taken by the U.S. president in response to these crimes should be hailed at a time when the international community has been unable to put a stop to such actions by the Syrian regime.”

Riyadh and other Gulf monarchies have long pushed for more decisive U.S. action against forces loyal to Mr. Assad, who is backed by Tehran—Saudi Arabia’s rival for regional influence.

“Everyone was waiting for the U.S. to act against Bashar al-Assad,” said Ibrahim al-Marie, a retired Saudi colonel and security analyst based in Riyadh. “The Trump administration is also saying: we will be a big player in Syria, not like the Obama administration.” CONTINUE AT SITE

We interrupt the Russia-scandal program to ask two simple questions of one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers: What exactly is FBI Director Jim Comey doing about the only crime that has so far been revealed in this Russia probe? And is he too conflicted even to be doing it?

That crime is of course the leaking that toppled Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The media and Democrats have done their best to avoid covering this, for the simple reason that some of them were complicit. Yet in the entire speculative drama over Russian interference in American elections, so far this is the only crime that is beyond any doubt.

It’s a serious crime, too. Someone in the U.S. government obtained highly classified information about a conversation between an incoming presidential adviser and a foreign official. Someone then leaked Mr. Flynn’s name and the contents of that conversation to the press, resulting in his resignation. As even Mr. Comey recently confirmed, the leaking of such material is an “extraordinarily unusual event.” It is also a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.

Why? Because such leaks expose American intelligence sources and methods, putting national security at risk. Moreover, leaking the names of private citizens under surveillance (with the express intent to cause harm) is among the grossest violations of civil liberties. It is what police states do.

The Washington Post story about Mr. Flynn’s conversation cited as its sources “nine current and former officials” who “had access to reports from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” That means at least nine current or former Obama administration officials or bureaucrats should be looking at criminal charges.

Which brings us to Mr. Comey. Leaks are in the FBI’s purview, and this case ought to be a slam dunk. Unlike in some leak investigations, Mr. Comey has a trail of bread loaves to follow. Someone in the U.S. government had to take the first step of “unmasking”—requesting the identity of—Mr. Flynn. There are records of such requests, easily accessible by the FBI. CONTINUE AT SITE